Mriganka Madhukaillya teaches New Media Technology and Cinema, as well as being the founder of the Media Lab, within the Department of Design at the Indian Institute of Technology, Guwahati. With a background in quantum mechanics and communication design, he has conducted research and taught at universities worldwide. He was a DAAD visiting professor at Merz Akademie, Stuttgart in 2019, and a visiting professor at the China Academy of Arts in Hangzhou in 2016-17.

Originally invested in documentary film work, as well as public events aimed at reviving a redundant space for discourse in India’s Northeast, Mriganka started developing projects with Desire Machine Collective and Periferry, which in time brought international attention to the singularity of the region.

Mriganka took part in landmark international exhibitions such as: Krishna in the Garden of Assam (British Museum, London, 2016), The Eight Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (Brisbane, Australia, 2015), After Midnight: Indian Modernism to Contemporary, India 1947 to 1997 (Queens Museum and Grey Art Gallery at New York University, 2015), Being Singular Plural (Solomon Guggenheim Museum, New York, 2012), Intense Proximity, the 3rd edition of the La Triennale (Palais de Tokyo, Paris, 2012), Indian Highway IV (MAC Musée d’Art Contemporain de Lyon, 2011) & Indian Highway V (MAXXI Museo Nazionale delle Arti del XXI Secolo, Rome, 2011). In 2011, Desire Machine Collective was part of the inaugural Indian Pavilion at the 54th International Art exhibition of the Venice Biennale, Everyone Agrees: It’s About to Explode.

Mriganka has been a member of several advisory boards, including acting as juror in Visual Arts for Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart. He is currently a member of the research networks Biopolitica, and Substantial Motion Research Network (initiated by Prof. Laura Marks and Prof. Azadeh Emadi). He has recently joined the Assam State Design Policy research group.

Since 2020, Mriganka is developing the research and design studio Forest Cybernetics. Current projects include the pedagogical lab Library in the forest, and the long term research on amphibious urbanism, incubated as part of Mriganka’s artistic residency at the Akademie der Kunste der Welt in Cologne, Germany, in 2024.